ABSTRACT
The Shift in Mental Health Paradigms: Introduction It is extremely difficult to define the current framework for psychiatry and mental health. None of the promises of the so-called ‘decade of the brain’ in the USA, and therefore in the Western world in general, seem to have come about. There have been no decisive discoveries regarding the functioning of the normal brain, let alone the ‘pathological’ one. There has been no progress beyond the generic recycling of multi-factor models for mental illness, first formulated over 30 years ago (Strauss and Carpenter, 1981; Zubin and Spring, 1977), but without any conjectures on the weight and role of the individual factors (Ciompi, 1983). The mapping of the human genome has yet to produce applications in psychiatry and the various genetic hypotheses, even those which are not absolutely unscientific and concocted ad hoc, such as the investigation into the reproduction of stigmata of vulnerability at the level of communication and language rather than the illness in itself (Crow and Deakin, 1987) have yet to be confirmed.
